


if you're lonely (you can talk to me)

by tenderjock



Series: a bit like you and me [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Gen, Minor suicidal ideation, canon-typical drinking & violence & death etc, someone PLEASE get book a therapist, theres technically major char death but they all get better so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:07:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25620316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenderjock/pseuds/tenderjock
Summary: There’s another one, Booker thinks, and puts his head in his hands so the others can’t see what his face is doing. Another one, and, Christ, she’s young, she doesn’t know –or: Booker finds Nile. Things devolve from there.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nile Freeman, Old Guard - team
Series: a bit like you and me [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1897099
Comments: 39
Kudos: 414





	if you're lonely (you can talk to me)

**Author's Note:**

> HUGE huge thank you to @hauntedjaeger (saellys) / @hauntedfalcon on tumblr for her glorious help with betaing this. couldnt have done it without her! basically the only thing that you need to know going into this fic is that i adore booker, sad sack of shit that he is, and i think he would probably benefit from some therapy. title from hey bulldog by the beatles.

There’s another one, Booker thinks, and puts his head in his hands so the others can’t see what his face is doing. Another one, and, Christ, she’s young, she doesn’t know –

“I saw part of a name tag,” he tells Joe, and takes a swig from his flask. Joe nods, scribbling in his sketchbook. “And a medevac.”

Booker wraps a hand around his own throat, thinking of a short drop and a sudden stop. “I felt her die,” he says, and squeezes his eyes shut. No, not now. Not this.

He argues with Joe, but his heart isn’t in it. And when Nicky says, “She’s more alone than she has ever been in her entire life,” he knows what he needs to do.

“I’ll find her,” Booker says to Andy, stumbling into standing. Andy shakes her head.

“We need you to find Copley,” she says. She stands too, with infinitely more grace than him. He reaches out, catches her shoulder.

“I can find her quickly, quietly,” he says. The humming panic, that he was sentencing this girl to capture, the worst fate – or second to worst, at the very least – had faded a little bit. He tries to smile. “You go to the Charlie safehouse. I’ll meet you there in a few days.”

“Days?” Andy asks, eyes searching his face. “That’s all it will take? You sure?”

Booker bites back a sigh. Old people, all of them. They underestimate the power of social media. Instead of explaining himself, he just nods. Andy places her hand over his, taps his knuckles gently, and steps back. Joe tears the page out of his sketchbook and hands it to Booker.

“See you in France,” Andy says, and he slings his pack on his shoulder and steps off the train.

It takes a minute for his legs to heal. He thinks, through the pain. His best bet, he decides, would be to kidnap this woman from the Marines, get her on a plane somewhere – East Asia, maybe? Somewhere far, far away from Copley’s employer’s headquarters in London – and give her enough money to eke out the next few decades, at the very least. Booker tries to ignore the little voice in the back of his head that’s whispering that  _ she’ll need more than that, she needs a family, she needs backup _ –

The truth is, they weren’t a family, not anymore. Andy was old and aching and tired. Joe and Nicky were content to spend the rest of their long, long lives rehashing the same missions, over and over again, like it really mattered. Booker just wanted rest. To close his eyes and not open them again.

He sighs, and starts walking.

: :

Her name is Nile Freeman. She’s an American Marine deployed in Afghanistan. Andy was right. Booker checks the safety on his gun. She’ll probably be insufferable about it.

Freeman is sitting, by herself, listening to music on her phone. Vaguely, Booker wonders what she’s listening to. It’s sort of exciting, if it wasn’t so depressing. He’s never met an immortal that was younger than him. Andy had been hoping that he would be the last; not that she’d say that out loud, but after two hundreds years, he knows the woman. He tries not to take it personally.

“Corporal Freeman,” a man says, coming around the corner, and Booker uses that as his cue to move. He pistol-whips one and throws the other head first into a metal carrying crate. Freeman snatches the second man’s gun and shoots, two hard hits to the chest. Booker swears, stumbles back, and strikes her in the face with the butt of his gun. She falls, stunned.

Booker loads her into the back of a truck, making sure the hatch is locked, gets in the driver’s seat and heads towards Kabul. On the outskirts of the city, one of Andy’s contacts is waiting with a plane to take her east.

It doesn’t take him long to cook her books. He provides his source with pictures of her, gleaned from Facebook, and a fake name – by the time they’ll get to the city, she’ll have a passport, a photo ID, and a black card. That should set her up well, he thinks, throwing a glance into the rearview mirror just in time to catch a boot in the back of the head.

Freeman scrambles out the passenger seat door. Booker swipes at the blood on his face; her kick broke his nose against the steering wheel. He doesn’t really worry about her getting away. He’s taken her phone and weapons, and they’re an hour’s drive from the closest civilization. He finds a tissue to clean up the blood and steps out of the truck.

She’s not running. Smart girl, he thinks. She’d die of heat exhaustion before she got too far, if she ran. She might die of heat exhaustion, anyway, but she doesn’t really have to worry about that anymore.

Booker fires, once. She collapses in a bloody heap. He blows his nose, spits up a clot of blood, and leans back in the truck to grab a bottle of water. As he’s cleaning his face, Freeman sits up.

“Please don’t do that again,” Booker says. “I only have so many bullets.”

“You shot me,” Freeman says. Booker shrugs.

“Sorry about that,” he says. “I couldn’t let you get away. Get back in the truck, please.”

“This isn’t real,” Freeman says, staring down at her shaking hands. “No… none of this is real.”

“It’s real,” Booker says, and crouches down next to her. “As real as anything else, anyway. Please get in the truck. We have to keep moving.” Freeman stares at him for a long moment, then turns and retches.

Booker sighs, and straightens up. The first few times are rough, he remembers now. Dangling from a rope, neck snapping and reforming just enough to let him choke to death, bowels emptying and frost forming little icicles on his eyelashes. The first few times are  _ slow _ , too.

Freeman stops throwing up, eventually. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Booker offers her the water bottle, half-drunk. She stares at him for a moment, then takes it.

“Who the hell are you?” she asks. She swirls water around her mouth, spits, and then takes a drink. Her eyes don’t leave Booker.

“Sebastien le Livre,” he says. “You can call me Booker.” He hesitates, wondering how much he should tell her. It’s risky, knowing what they know. The rest of them have each other to lean on, or they would. They should. Freeman’s on her own. But surely it’s even riskier to leave her blind? He doesn’t know. This is why Andy’s their leader, not him. Well, one of the reasons.

“I’m part of a team,” he says. “An army of immortals, like you.”

“Immortal?” Freeman says, voice hoarse. Her eyes are wide. “No, that – that isn’t –”

“You can’t die,” Booker says, as gentle as he knows how. He had thought that his immortality was a gift from God, at first. Before he realized what a curse it truly was. “Not anymore. Or you can, rather, but you don’t stay dead. You didn’t stay dead when your throat was slit. You didn’t stay dead when I shot you just now. I didn’t stay dead when you shot me, either.”

He offers her a hand. She looks from his hand to his face to the bloody bullet holes in his shirt. After a long second, she takes the hand. He heaves her to her feet.

“C’mon, Freeman,” he says. “Get back in the truck and I will try to answer your questions.”

Booker walks back to the truck and climbs in the driver’s seat. He can hear the crunch of loose gravel grinding beneath her boots. Freeman pulls herself into the passenger seat, closes the door, and carefully straps on her seatbelt. After that’s done, she turns her head to look at him. There’s a smear of blood and brains on her shoulder.

Booker isn’t like Andy; he doesn’t know how to read people that well. But Freeman looks scared, and like she is trying desperately to hide it. He starts the engine and takes a swig out of his flask. Christ. What a clusterfuck.

Freeman eyes him. Booker tries to keep his gaze on the road, but it’s hard, with a new immortal  _ right there _ . She’s so young. Twenty-six, according to the research he had done before kidnapping her. She is from Chicago, which is actually a place he had never been.

“Are you taking me to join your army?” she asks.

He snorts. “No,” he says.

Freeman frowns; it seems like she hadn’t anticipated his answer. “Why not?”

Booker exhales, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, which still has some blood on it. He tries to come up with an explanation for what he’s doing with Copley without sounding sketchy, and fails.

“Well,” he says. “We’re sort of on the run, right now. It wouldn’t be safe.”

“I thought you said I couldn’t die,” Freeman says. Booker shrugs.

“Sure,” he says. “You can’t. But you can be captured, and tortured. The rest of us – we know what we’re getting into. You need to steer clear of us for right now.”

Freeman stares at him. He can tell she’s staring, without turning his head. He can feel it.

“Sounds like you expect a lot of shit to go down,” she says. Booker winces.

“I, ah,” he says. He thinks frantically of something to say. His mind is absolutely blank. A person would think, after two hundred-odd years on this planet, he would be able to talk with a fucking twenty-six-year-old without making an idiot of himself.

Freeman reaches out and places a hand on his wrist. “Booker,” she says, with the same iron conviction that Andy wears like a mantle, “I think you should tell me what’s going on.”

So he does.

Not everything, no. He doesn’t divulge that much of his sad backstory, or Andy’s sad backstory, or Joe and Nicky’s sad backstory, for that matter. But the rest of it all comes spilling out of him in great spurts.

“My son, Jean-Pierre,” he says. The words feel like they are being dredged out of him. “He died when he was forty-two. Cancer. I didn’t have a family anymore, so I had no reason not to join the team -” He blinks hard.

Freeman is still looking at him. She looks less scared, more sure of herself. Great, because he sure as hell isn’t feeling sure of himself.

“All we do is fucking kill people,” Booker says. “That’s it. We kill, and we get killed, and is it too much to ask for it to end? And Copley promised…” He trails off. Freeman jumps on it.

“Who’s Copley?” she asks. Her voice is barely more than a murmur. It’s like she thinks she’ll spook him if she talks too loud.

“A security analyst. Ex-CIA,” Booker says, tired. Fuck, but he’s tired. “In exchange for the entire team, he was going to find a way to end it. And, of course, a way to replicate our DNA for other patients, people with dementia, or cancer, or fuck if I know. Saving the world stuff.” He takes a shuddery breath, and continues.

In a perverse way, spilling his guts makes him feel better. Is this what therapy is like?

“Copley said he was going to help people, but it would take turning in the team,” Booker says. “I thought, you know, if it were just me, I could do that. I could handle being a little lab rat. But Copley said he needed all four of us.” He glances in the rearview mirror, more out of habit than anything else. There’s no one behind them.

Freeman doesn’t say anything. She just listens, as he talks about the setup, and Copley, and the team, and Copley’s employer’s promise that they would find a way to end it.

He realizes he’s crying about halfway through his explanation. He presses the bloody tissue to his nose, sniffs, and focuses on the drive. For a minute, they continue in silence.

Freeman shifts in her seat. “Not to tell you what to do,” she says. “Although you clearly need someone to tell you what to do. But. You should probably not go through with this.”

“Copley already knows where they are,” Booker said. The tears have stopped, which is something. “He’s probably putting together a team to capture them right now. I have to go, and warn them – no. I need to get you out of range. That comes first.”

“Is that why you came to find me?” Freeman asks. Booker nods without looking away from the road. “Fuck,” she says. “Well, thanks, I guess.”

They spend the next five minutes in uncomfortable silence, until Freeman has the bright idea to ask him whether he’s ever been in Afghanistan before. He remembers what it was like, to be fascinated with the concept of people existing for centuries before he was born. She’s eager for any scrap of information he gives her.

Booker can do this: he regales her with stories of drinking coffee in Kabul, and hiking out into the desert with Joe and Nicky to look at the stars, and the way Andy beat a young Tajik at arm-wrestling through sheer force of will.

“I never tried the coffee here,” Freeman says, a little wistfully. “Besides the instant crap that the military has.” Booker glances at her, then away. If they don’t get her out of harm’s way, there’s a good chance that she’ll never drink coffee again.

He finally, finally pulls up out front of Andrei’s little shitty landing strip. He fishes a plastic bag full of clothes out from under the seat. “Put those on,” he tells Freeman. He hands her another bottle of water, too. “You have blood in your hair.”

“Wonder why,” she snarks back, but she takes the clothes and goes up into the plane to change.

Booker spends that time going over her new documentation with a fine-tooth comb. Normally, under ideal circumstances, he would make her passport himself. Despite that, he can find no fault in her fakes, and pays the woman who made them an extravagant amount of money to signal his appreciation for her work.

When he’s judged that Freeman has had enough time to change clothes, he climbs up to the plane. She’s sliding her neatly folded Marine uniform underneath her seat. He hands over her new passport and wallet.

“Daniella Gascon,” she says. “Like d’Artagnan?”

Booker laughs, suddenly and unexpectedly. It surprises them both. “You know,” he says, “It’s nice to have someone who appreciates my literary references.”

Andrei gets into the pilot’s seat and starts the engine. Booker hands over the tickets from Mumbai to the Suvarnabhumi Airport over to her. “I have to go, Freeman,” he says, his tone rather apologetic, entirely by accident. Nicky’s comments aside, he really does remember what it was like to die, and come back, over and over without explanation. He finds that he doesn’t want to leave Freeman right now. The last two days have been a much-needed break for him.

“Here’s a number you can reach us at,” Booker says, handing over the little burner phone. “In case of emergency.”

She dips her head, and sighs. She folds back the cover of the passport, squints at the photo, and then tilts her gaze up at him. “Nile,” she says. “You can call me Nile.”

Booker looks at her for a long moment. “Nile, then,” he eventually says. “It was nice to meet you.”

“Booker,” Nile says, and reaches out to clasp his hand. “You owe me a coffee.”

He glances over at her, surprised, and realizes she’s grinning. Without thinking about it, he finds himself smiling back.

“Until next time, Nile,” he says, gets off the damn plane. Then, before she can step away: “Don’t worry. We’ll make sure you’re safe.”

Nile steps back, swings the plane’s door shut. Andrei’s helpers rush toward to pull the ladder away from the plane. She’s still watching him out the window. Booker waves, and then stops. The plane, and Nile, fades away into the Afghanistan sun in a great clatter of metal and air.

_ Goodbye, _ he thinks, and hopes like hell that it’s the last time that he sees her.

: :

Booker makes it to the Charlie safehouse within a day, but it’s too late; they have Joe and Nicky. Andy is unsteady and drawn. He’s never seen her like this before. He wonders whether this is what she was like, those first few decades after – after Quynh.

He wants to tell Andy, to confess, but. She’s not the forgiving type, really. And with Nicky and Joe gone –

Well. It seems like the only thing to do is to direct her straight at Copley. So Booker says,  _ yes, here, I found him. _

It’s technically not a lie. It burns all the same.

: :

Joe yells. Joe always yells. Nicky tells him to lay off, first in English, then in old Italian. His voice is soft, almost gentle, but the look he shoots Booker is anything but.

Andy stares up at the ceiling, pale with pain and blood loss. “You’re a goddamned coward, Book,” she says. Her hand moves, like she wants to reach out to him – to hit him, maybe. Even if she could reach him from the bed she’s strapped to, the restraints around her wrists prevent her from doing anything.

Booker closes his eyes. He deserves this. He deserves every minute of it: Joe howling insults at him; Nicky quiet and resigned, like he had always suspected this of Booker; and mostly, Andy, bloody unhealing hole in her side, just lying there, not even looking at him.

The asshole that Booker sold them out to comes to visit them. He says,  _ I will carve slices off of you for years to get what I want _ , and Booker keeps his eyes closed, wishing he had the guts to pray. He hasn’t thought about God in years – decades, more like. There’s nothing he wants more in this moment than to go back a year and undo every little thing he’s done that led him to this point.

It might be more than a year back, if he’s honest with himself. This might have been waiting for him since the moment that first noose tightened around his neck.

“Your time is coming,” Merrick says, and it would have been impressive, maybe, if a phone hadn’t taken that second to ring, an obnoxiously loud generic jingle.

“Ah,” Booker says. “I think that’s me,” and then he realizes he has no way to answer. He flops his restrained hands uselessly. Andy closes her eyes, the way she does when she wants to laugh but can’t seem to find the energy to do it. Everyone else stares at Booker like he’s grown an extra head. The security guy fishes the phone out of Booker’s pocket and stomps on it. The jingle ends with a rather pathetic  _ woomp _ .

“Hey,” Booker says, which earns him a blow across the face from the idiot security director. English military, Booker clocks him as. Probably spent time fighting the Boko Haram. Christ. What a fucking baby.

Merrick leaves, eventually, and Joe resumes his yelling. Booker spends the next several hours staring up at the ceiling, pretending he doesn’t hear any of it. Andy, lying next him, does the same, although probably for wildly different reasons.

And then, halfway through Joe’s rather inventive description of what they should do with him, Booker hears a volley of gunshots. He sits up, as far as he can sit up while still remaining tied to a medical cot, and stares at the stainless-steel door of the lab.

Gunshots sound out, again, closer this time. All four of them watch the door. The doctor is glancing up from the alarm lights to their beds, as though she thinks that they have something to do with it. Andy is frowning. She’s looking a little better since they got that IV line into her arm.

The door swings open to another round of gunshots and –

“Nile?” Booker asks. She’s supposed to be in Thailand. In the room beyond the medical lab, there’s movement and he says, “Behind you –”

She whips around and fires off two shots, getting hit once in the leg herself. She stumbles back, letting the door swing shut. The doctor has grabbed a syringe and raises it to attack.

“Watch out!” Nicky says. Nile turns and clubs the doctor with the butt of her pistol. The doctor goes sprawling; Nile turns to look at the four of them.

If Booker were in a better frame of mind, it might be funny. What had he told her –  _ we’ll make sure you’re safe? _ To tell her that, and to end up like this.

“How did you find us?” he says, instead of any of that. Nile pauses, and dangles a cell phone between finger and thumb.

“You forgot to burn your burner, asshole,” she says. She goes to untie Booker. “And this guy named Copley helped. Four shooters at the door and more coming.” She pauses, halfway through unbuckling the strap. “What’s wrong with her?” she asks, gesturing towards Andy and the IV drip in her arm.

“Andromache is not healing,” Nicky says. Neither he nor Joe have looked away from Nile since she walked in the door. Joe looks contemplative; Nicky looks impassive. Andy is still staring at the ceiling.

Nile digests that for a moment. She slides the pistol into Booker’s free hand. He hands it back.

“Leave it,” he says. “Leave me here.”

“No man left behind,” she snaps.

Joe scoffs. “There’s always a first time,” he says. “He’s nothing but a traitor –”

“Joe,” Andy says, not loud, but forceful. “Don’t. Not now.”

“Besides,” Nile says, moving on to release Andy. “You still owe me a coffee. Asshole.”

Booker swallowed hard, but the truth was that he  _ didn’t _ want to be here, with their needles and scalpels, pinned to a hospital bed for the rest of his life. Maybe he’s small and petty and, yes, Joe, quite pathetic, but he doesn’t want to be tortured for all eternity. He wavers for a moment, guilt rising in his chest like a physical thing, then cocks the gun and unties his legs.

They walk out of there, like always. Booker helps Nile crawl out of the broken wreckage of the car, bones and joints popping back into place. They pile into Copley’s car and Andy just drives. No one asks where they’re going. Behind them, blue and cherry lights mark the arrival of the London police.

When Andy’s face is gray with pain and her knuckles grip the steering wheel hard enough that the leather creaks, Joe makes her pull over. Nicky cleans himself up with a water bottle and pulls on a spare hoodie that they find in the trunk, then takes the wheel. They manage to make it to the Juliet safehouse without getting stopped or pulled over, which is probably good considering that they are all heavily armed and absolutely covered in blood.

Nile sits next to Booker at what could generously be called a kitchen table. This particular safehouse is one of Booker’s favorites; it’s an old abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of the London commuter belt that overlooks a swath of land that’s not really big enough to be called a field. Last time they were here, Joe and Booker spent two hours picking blackberries and throwing clumps of dirt at each other, and Nicky had baked the berries into a beautiful galette.

Booker sincerely doubts that Joe wants to go pick blackberries with him now.

“Hey,” Nile says, after a moment of silence. She’s clearly had a quick wash in the cold-water-only sink that’s out behind the building. Booker thinks it might have been a horse trough, originally. She’s also wearing clothes that more or less fit and don’t have bullet holes in them.

Booker has filled a coffee mug from his flask and is now drinking whiskey in big gulps. God, but the Americans sure know how to make a drink.

“Hey,” he says back. There’s dried blood crusting on his face; he can feel it. He probably looks a mess. He  _ feels  _ a mess, at the very least. None of the others have said a word to him. He takes another gulp of whiskey.

“They’re trying to decide a punishment for you,” Nile tells him. He shrugs and drinks his whiskey. He knows that they’re trying to find the appropriate sentence for his crime. There’s not a lot that they can do to him, he thinks, and swallows a bit more whiskey than he had meant to.

It’s not much of a surprise that they’re struggling to decide on his punishment. What  _ is  _ a surprise is the fact that it takes them three days and a visit to a pub to figure it out.

Andy picks the pub. It’s historic, or something. Andy likes it because the bartenders, regardless of gender, never fail to flirt with her. Booker’s outside, drinking a gin neat, when Nile comes to join him, abandoning her beer to do so.

He glances at her, then immediately looks away. There’s something about her that’s so – young, maybe. Not naïve, not quite, but unused to the way they do things. It’s almost painful to watch.

“They’re still deciding,” she says, and Booker catches Joe’s gaze through the window and knows that whatever they decide, he won’t like it.

“There’s not much to decide,” he says. He takes a sip of his gin. “It’s not like they can kill me.”

Nile frowns at him. Whatever her disapproval is about, he never knows. Andy finds him, later, attempting to skip stones on the Thames. She doesn’t say anything for a long moment.

“There’s got to be a price,” she says, and Booker braces himself.

All things considered, the price isn’t that great. Booker expected worse; he expected banishment for his entire life, maybe, or some fate worse than he could imagine, another iron coffin sunk below the waves. A hundred years isn’t such a great amount of time, he tells himself, even as his heart sinks down somewhere around his boots. Still, Nile doesn’t seem to agree with the others.

“It’s not right,” she says. The two of them are settled down, drinking in the old pub after the others have left. “You clearly need help –”

“Thanks ever so,” he says, dryly. She continues with a wave of her hand.

“You need help, and therapy, and probably alcohol intervention, and they won’t provide any of that.”

Booker looks at her, and takes a sip of his beer. After a moment, he manages to drag up the words that he needs to say: “I betrayed them,” he says, and takes a deep shuddering breath. Saying the words out loud makes a difference. “I did the single worst thing that I could have done, and if they never forgive me for it, it would be too soon.”

“Bullshit,” Nile says flatly. Booker blows out a sigh.

“You don’t understand,” he says. “You can’t understand, because you don’t know the weight of all these years –”

“ _ Bullshit _ ,” Nile says. She stands up and scrabbles in her pocket for her wallet. Then her gaze turns softer. “Maybe you betrayed them,” she says. “I’m not going to argue with that. Maybe they feel that a hundred years is fair punishment. But you never betrayed  _ me _ . You did everything you could do to keep me safe.” She tosses some money on the table, enough to cover her drink but not Booker’s.

Booker blinks at her. He’s in that stage of drunkenness where everything is a step to the left of normal. When he stands, the room spins a bit. He’s sober enough to remember to pay, leaving a handsome tip, sort of by habit. Nile grabs his arm.

“C’mon,” she says. “Let’s get you home.” They stumble down the street - an alley, really - arm in arm, and for a moment, everything seems alright. Booker thinks to himself,  _ but in this version you are  _ not _ feeding yourself to a bad man _ and swallows an unhinged, irreverent laugh. Nile leans her head upon his shoulder.

“You’ll be good,” he says, apropos of nothing. “For the team, I mean.” Nile hums.

“Yeah, Booker,” she says. And then: “Next week, same time, same place.”

“No,” he says. “Next week in Paris. I’ll show you the best damn coffee in the world.”

“Okay,” Nile says. “Next week in Paris. ‘Til then …”

“Yeah,” Booker says. Nile straightens her shoulders and gets into the car that had been waiting, Copley at the wheel. Copley’s throwing out questioning glances. Booker slumps against the wall of this alley and runs a hand over his face.

A hundred years. It’s not so bad, really, although his stomach ties up in knots at the thought of it. It’ll give them time to cool down. His biggest regret is Andy – Andy with that goddamn hole in her side, Andy who will be long gone by the time his hundred years are up. Today was the last time he’ll see Andy alive, he thinks, and swallows hard.

He’s got coffee next week in Paris. That’s something to look forward to.

**Author's Note:**

> again, a big thank you to @hauntedjaeger; go check out some of her work on ao3. i'm tenderjock on tumblr, so feel free to hmu about tog or anything else, really!


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